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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent...

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Independence Day warning about “dimaagi Naxals” should therefore not be dismissed as another political label. His larger point was that an insurgency does not survive on ammunition alone. It survives on ideas and people willing to make violence appear morally fashionable. The most revealing feature of India’s Maoist movement was never simply its brutality. It was the strange attraction it exercised over sections of the metropolitan Left elite. The Naxalite with an AK-47 could be transformed into a romantic revolutionary while the policeman he killed became an instrument of an oppressive state. This was not merely naïveté. At its ugliest, it was the intellectual laundering of political violence. The fantasy of the romantic revolutionary has always been seductive. In this narrative, amplified through sympathetic media priding itself on telling ‘truth to power,’ India was not a constitutional democracy struggling with inequality and corruption but an inherently illegitimate state waiting to be overthrown. In the minds of this elite Left, Maoist violence has often been recast as resistance while attacks on infrastructure as blows against capitalism. The armed overthrow of the Indian republic was the liberation they craved for. Some of India’s most celebrated intellectuals have flirted dangerously close to that moral inversion. The issue here is whether intellectual prestige can be used to sanitise an ideology whose practitioners have murdered civilians, policemen and public servants and terrorised some of India’s poorest districts. A university cannot be the place where Maoist romanticism acquires the legitimacy of a fashionable campus cause. Professors who turn armed insurgents into heroic revolutionaries are not merely exercising academic freedom. If they knowingly excuse violence, they are helping to construct the moral vocabulary that makes violence possible. Let’s be clear here. A professor who criticises the Indian state is not a Naxal while a journalist who exposes state excesses is not an enemy of India. But an intellectual who repeatedly excuses, glorifies or rationalises political violence cannot hide behind the word ‘dissent.’ India has paid an enormous price for the Maoist fantasy. Thousands have died. Entire regions were held back by fear while development was obstructed. The people supposedly being liberated were often the first to suffer. The armed Naxal is now being pushed towards extinction. But the Indian republic cannot afford to leave behind the romantic mythology that made the gun respectable. A democracy can tolerate dissent. It should never be expected to tolerate the glorification of those who seek its violent destruction.

Unbroken Shrine

Few buildings in India carry as much historical sediment as the Somnath temple on Gujarat’s wind-scoured coast. It has been smashed, rebuilt, looted and restored so many times that it has become less a shrine than a ledger of the subcontinent’s civilisational fortunes


Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at the recent ‘Somnath Swabhiman Parv,’ captured that essence with unusual clarity. The ‘Shaurya Yatra’ - a ceremonial procession organised to honour those who laid down their lives defending the Somnath temple in Gujarat’s Gir Somnath district – saw thousands joining in.


When the PM said that the flag flying over Somnath today shows India’s power to the world, he was not boasting but stating a fact that has been politically inconvenient for decades.


Nothing captures this inconvenience better than the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s refusal to attend Somnath’s reconstruction in 1951. While Sardar Patel and thousands of ordinary Indians rebuilt the shrine from rubble, Nehru kept his distance, uneasy with a symbol that contradicted his imported modernist vision of India. To Nehru, Somnath was an awkward reminder that India’s past could not be neatly separated from its faith. To Modi, it is proof that faith and identity are what allowed India to survive conquest.


From Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 C.E. to Aurangzeb six centuries later, Somnath was not assaulted merely because it was rich but because of its distinct symbolism. It was one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines, a jyotirlinga of Shiva, perched defiantly on the western edge of India where traders, pilgrims and ideas had converged for over a millennium. To destroy it was to announce domination over a civilisation.


Ghazni understood this. Persian court historians such as al-Utbi did not describe his raid as a robbery but as an act of iconoclasm, a holy war against idolatry.


Later rulers followed the script. When the Delhi Sultanate expanded into Gujarat, Somnath was again attacked by Alauddin Khalji’s general Ulugh Khan, and later under the Gujarat Sultans, the shrine was damaged. By the time Aurangzeb’s edict ordered its destruction in the seventeenth century, the temple had become less a source of treasure than a provocation.


By reducing these repeated assaults to opportunistic looting, the Nehru-era ‘historians’ stripped them of their ideological core.


Yet, Somnath’s story is not just one of destruction, but of relentless revival. Few monuments anywhere in the world have been so systematically attacked and so stubbornly rebuilt.


The Nehruvian state tried to bury that lesson. It taught Indians to feel awkward about their own scars, to treat historical trauma as a communal inconvenience rather than a national inheritance. The result was not harmony, but amnesia which regrettably always favours the aggressor.


Modi’s Somnath speech was therefore a geopolitical assertion. In a world where China wraps itself in 5,000 years of civilization, a history-denying India would be a strategic absurdity. Nations that do not believe in themselves are easily bullied by those that do. 


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